Politicians, who were silent, complicit, or even instigative during last September’s tragedy, are trying to rebrand themselves on social media to be palatable to “Gen Z” - Nepal’s youth population that was instrumental in overthrowing the last government, leading to comparisons with Bangladesh’s ‘Monsoon Revolution’ of 2024 and Sri Lanka’s Aragayala of 2022.
What links these cases — Pakistan, Britain, India, the Netherlands — is not geography or faith, but backlash. ‘Honour’ is used as a pretext to kill not because women are obedient, but because they are not. It is activated when women seek education, choose partners, leave abusive homes, testify in public, or simply insist on being treated as full human beings.
How do our regulators allow a university to function with almost every leadership position, academic and administrative, occupied by a member of the promoter family? How does patent filing become a game, as alleged in this case, or how does a paper authored under the university on banging vessels to kill the coronavirus get written? The incident brought to sharp light how India has slipped into an education system run on high fees by private institutions with questionable credentials.
Under the BNP, particularly during Khaleda Zia’s rule, four major anti-India terrorist camps were being run in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Notably, these terrorist training camps had Al Qaeda and Pakistan ISI/military instructors. As a young officer, Pervez Musharraf (later president of Pakistan) also served as an instructor in these terrorist training camps. To assume that the radical elements of the BNP will not be in league with the JeI will be the height of naviete.
While air remains a major mode of transportation for tourists—almost 77 percent, around 80 percent of Bangladeshi tourists used the land as the mode of transportation. Thus, an integrated, cross-border railway network as a faster mode of transport could bring enormous benefits to the region, including boosting regional trade.
There are not many developing countries like India having the capability to produce such a wide variety of warships ranging from fast-attack craft to aircraft carriers, writes Col Anil Bhat (retd) for South Asia Monitor
India is the only country in the world that was ruled by Muslims for nearly 1,000 years and yet never become a Muslim country. A probable answer lies in the higher quality of Indian spiritual thought, writes Anil Rajvanshi for South Asia Monitor
For a regime as isolated as the Afghan Taliban with weak resources at its disposal, acting against the Pakistan-based TTP is like giving up on the little leverage it enjoys so far. Furthermore, there is little indication of the group’s willingness so far to transform itself into an internationally accepted ruling regime by weakening its links with ideological fellow travellers
The global chemicals industry is portraying the Sri Lankan crisis as related to a few months' stop in the import of chemical fertilizers in April 2021, not recognizing that the ban was related to Colombo’s debt crisis
The role of China will have a direct bearing on the Indo-Pacific security matrix given China’s warm relations with most of the Indo-Pacific states
Why did the influential Purana Kashmiris not think of the 1990s Kashmir Pandit exodus as a personal issue and raise their voice? Why did they take part in the conspiracy of silence that seems to have cloaked the issue for 30 odd years?
One other unintended consequence of the potential failure of the Russian operation is that it could slow down - and possibly stop the triumphant march of the autocrats – or so-called strongmen - the world over, writes Frank Islam for South Asia Monitor
The manner in which Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were, first, officially executed on March 23, 1931, and their bodies brutally chopped, marks one of the darkest chapters of British colonialism in India
In Washington, Price acknowledged Monday at a briefing that India developed defence ties with Russia because the US was not ready for such a relationship when the Soviet Union and India drew close
The Biden administration and India are evolving a delicate balance at the centre of which is China on how New Delhi reacts to the Russia invasion of Ukraine
Beyond the number of deaths and whether to define the Pandits’ barbaric displacement as genocide, this is a chapter of contemporary Indian history that has received woefully inadequate media and scholarly attention, writes Mayank Chhaya for South Asia Monitor
"The unbalanced and contradictory picture of death and dying,” tells the tale of a society lost in modern medicine and unmindful of where this is taking us, write M.R. Rajagopal and Jagdish Rattanani for South Asia Monitor
He used his annual presence in Davos to make a convincing tour de horizon of the great strengths and resilience of the Indian economy, writes Amb Bhaswati Mukherjee (retd) for South Asia Monitor
If the rural poor can be given a basic ‘thali’ at subsidized price, they will not only get proper food but do away with the drudgery of cooking, writes Anil K. Rajvanshi for South Asia Monitor
